Good news from the Linux world. Fedora has announced its intention to drastically alter the file system layout of its Linux distribution. The plan's been out for a while, but was brought to my attention by Brian Proffitt (still the best name ever) over at ITWorld. The gist is to move all binaries to /usr/bin, and all libraries to /usr/lib and /user/lib64.

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what are you talking about? you can install programs wherever you want on windows

It would be nice if people actually thought a little about the post they reply to rather than just reacting to it

At no point did I say you couldn't install apps where-ever you wanted in Windows. I just said it matters. In Windows there is no global directory for 3rd party application like there is in Linux. This means everything has to be called for with absolute paths when writing scripts. "

%PROGRAMFILES% does not solve that problem. I still can't just type "firefox" in a cmd window and have firefox launched. I'd have to know what directory firefox is in, even if it's only relative to %PROGRAMFILES%.
Unless of course I add every programs folder into %PATH% but that's a bit awkward.

%PROGRAMFILES% does not solve that problem. I still can't just type "firefox" in a cmd window and have firefox launched.

No, but you can type in "start firefox".

Applications on Windows can register themselves in the "known applications" list, and can then be launched from anywhere with the "start" command (or Start -> Run, or in code using ShellExecute and ShellExecuteEx).

%PROGRAMFILES% is only a variable name for an absolute path to a top level install directory. Nothing more.

It wont include the full install paths to any application installs (as they will be sub-directories) and it wont work for any applications that install out of that specific top level folder (which may not be the norm, but it does occasionally happen).

What I'm talking about is %PATH%, which holds multiple directories and anything within those directories runs without an absolute path. You could add every single directory for every single application install into %PATH%, but that would be time consuming and could likely screw up other things due to:
1/ length of the environmental variable
2/ access times where the HDD is forced to seek dozens of different directories.

So perhaps you'd want to research a little into your own suggestions before being condensing to others

One request: Please don't troll!

Is it even possible to have a discussion on here without someone accusing someone else of "trolling" or being a "fanboy"?
*bangs head on desk until it goes numb*